Life With Horace

poetry & essays

Category Archives: family


by 1 Comment

Archibald and the last watch

Thanks to my father, a good part of my family has the funny bone chromosome. Full spectrum mutations ranging from slapstick to suave joke telling. As far as I can tell, it started when he went to college at 16 and discovered the sweet spot in the City College Assembly Hall for delivering hilarious whispered naughtiness that only the speaker at the lectern could hear.

Now, when my son and youngest brother get together, there’s always a point where I’ll have to leave the room. They’re not nasty, they don’t fart, spit or scratch unattractively. They are punsters, inveterate, I’ll-one-up-you, let’s see how long we can keep this one going funny guys. Leaving the room is easy. Try walking down a city street with them when they’re on a roll.

When our family gathers the jokes come out. Riffs on the early greats we listened to with Pop (Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer or Shelley Berman, and yes, Lenny Bruce) topped only by Mel Brooks or better yet Mel teamed up with Carl Reiner. To this day my take on longevity and grand feats of daring has a lot to do with the nectarine.

Yes, the nectarine. An off the cuff bit from The 2000 Year Old Man. Interviewed by Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks’ alter ego gives credit to the nectarine, “half a peach, half a plum” for his longevity, or at least 164 years of it.

Pop also had a thing for watches. The backstory is that he had an institutional supply business in upstate New York and much of New England, all of it with Catholic parishes and schools. You name the town, he knew the local parish priest or Mother Superior. This meant that Pop could get just about anything wholesale, including watches, which he loved and gave to us at the drop of a hat.

In 2005 at age 89, Pop died, very suddenly. It was July, and very hot. We all converged on my sister Annie’s house and hugged and cried and told Pop stories, fanned ourselves and took care of the obit, cleaned out his apartment, planned a memorial to be held in the fall.

Someone mentioned the watches. At which point my nephew Jason told us Pop had “sent him” a watch on his trip east from Chicago. He flew out very late, and O’Hare was almost deserted. When he got through Security, there, in a plastic bin ahead of the one with his stuff in it, was a watch. Sitting there all by itself.

The TSA guys had no idea where it came from, said it had to be his, no one had been through for over an hour. Jason got the weirdest feeling about that watch. I

He was certain it was from Grandpa. So, right or wrong the watch came along, as I guess it was meant to. More laughter and tears, as we looked at the Last Watch.

Who the heck is Archibald you ask? He, or more accurately, it, is an honorary member of our family. For the uninitiated, Archibald Essselbrook is a tour de force joke, a supremely racy tongue twister that Pop mastered many years ago. He always told it perfectly, at breakneck speed. It never failed to leave his listeners helpless with laughter.

So, old Archie was listed in Pop’s obituary: “He also leaves his beloved friend, Archibald Esselbrook of Hudson, NY”. It made perfect sense to all of us, our private in-joke for Pop.

Its delivery seems to be a guy thing, and that’s cool with me. My brothers all know it, and I guess my son will too eventually. That’s one I’ll stick around for.

BH in the field


by Leave a comment

the letter writer

Does anyone remember letters the way I do? Seeing the envelope come through the slot, or waiting in one’s cubby or the mailbox, and knowing something wonderful might be inside? Opening it up and sitting down with a sigh of pleasure to read the latest news?

My Uncle Bruce was the best letter writer I’ve ever known. He was an archaeologist, a gifted artist, collector, linguist, traveler and observer of life. He never married, but doted on his seven nieces and nephews and their clans. When not off to teach, on a dig, or visiting friends in far flung places, he lived in the middle of 23 acres near the ocean. The natural world was a major force in his life, and he wrote about it often.

Several years ago the family began to clean up and clear out our house in Rhode Island. Decades of Bruce’s letters to and from family, friends and colleagues emerged. What a capacity for friendship he had. He was warm, thoughtful, gentle, courteous in conversation and generous in his relationships. But he gave so much of himself in a letter. Once past the hurdle of deciphering his handwriting, the contents were yours to savor: detailed, insightful, humor-filled news from wherever he was, reports of family doings and foibles, the natural world outside his door, wonderful sketches, his take on politics, human behavior, books he had read, movies seen, music listened to, and clippings he had saved just for you.

Away at school at 13 I loved his letters because they were long, interesting, often snarky, and best of all, frequent.

It wasn’t until much later that I recognized how loving they were, how much family glue he slipped into them, along with gentle admonishments and guidance, and the fruits of his considerable intellect. While he hated confrontation, he did not shrink from the truth as he saw it, and he never hesitated to express his opinions in a letter, as he did when he wrote:

“In my 9th decade of life on this orb I have grown to appreciate and respect and crave long letters more and more and more as I come to realize that such mirrors of life and doings and… human gregarious activity… are all too rare and getting rarer… e-mail, faxes and the despicable, lazy, vaporous telephone life are… very poor substitutes for a family’s lore and tellings… the stuff of one’s decency and character and outlook on the world, what helps get us through the rat-race! Honestly, I savor and need such letters to make up for not being on the jittery-dithering-frantic mainstream of family telephoning and so-called ‘news’.”

To hold a piece of his chrome yellow paper is to bring him back, if only for an instant. In my mind’s eye these letters and the memory of his presence glow warmly in the hearts of all of us, bright evidence of a remarkable man’s great capacity for friendship, connection and love.